"Well," she retorted with strange energy, "if you are told that now, you may believe it, and reply that you have it from a sure source." And looking at him with an air at once of triumph and of despair, she added: "I am Monsieur de Varades's mistress, do you hear?" And she repeated: "I am Monsieur de Varades's mistress." Armand listened to her repetition of these words by which she was inflicting dishonour upon herself, and his feeling was one rather of pain than of sorrow. It appeared to him as well piteous as insane that, impelled by some sickly appetite for drama and emotion, she should thus come and tell him of the renewal of her amour with her former lover. On the other hand, he had not, at the period of his first suspicions, been in possession of an absolute, indisputable assurance respecting the guilty nature of the relations between Helen and De Varades, and now she had come to denounce herself to him in so brutal a fashion that he could not help feeling a spasm of base jealousy; and he replied with involuntary abruptness: "You are perfectly free; how do you think that concerns me? Unless," he added, cruelly, "I can be of use to you?" "Don't play the wit," she went on more violently still. "You owe it to me to listen to me; the least a man can do is to listen to the woman he has ruined. For you have ruined me; yes, you, and I wish you to know it. Ah! you thought that I was lying, that I was showing off to please you, when I told you that I had never had a lover before yourself; will you believe me now when I tell you in the same breath that I am to-day Monsieur de Varades's mistress, and that I was not so before? I have met him again, and I have given myself to him. Do not ask me why, but it is a fact. You see that I am not seeking to play a part, that I am not afraid of your contempt, that I have not come to renew relations with you; but it is equally true that I have degraded and polluted all that is in me. And when I gave myself to you I was so pure! I had nothing, nothing on my conscience! I had kept myself for you alone, as though I had known that I was one day to meet you. Ah! that is what I want you to know. A woman who accuses herself as I am doing now has nothing left to be careful about, has she? Why should I lie to you now? Tell me, why? You will be forced to believe me, and you will say to yourself: 'I was her first love; she did not deny herself because she loved me. She loved me as man dreams of being loved, with her whole heart, her whole being, and not in the present merely, but in the past. And see what I have made of the woman who loved me thus--a creature who has ceased to believe in anything or respect anything, who has taken a fresh lover in caprice, who will take a second and a third--a ruined woman.' Yes, once more, it is you who have ruined me, and I want, I want you to know it, and it will be my revenge that you will never more be able to doubt it. Ruined! Ruined! You have ruined me--you! you! you!"